“stray”

Para Site Art Space in co-operation with Goethe-Institut Hongkong has invited one of Germany's most prolific curators, Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Hamburger Kunstverein to curate an exhibition and present a lecture.

“stray” will introduce young artists whose works have a specific interest in the social significance of urban spaces.

How is urban space read in big cities? What forces are in play in the regulation of space? What influences do global markets have on local conditions and what are the relations between the artistic production and the changing economical, social and political changes.

The diverse personal backgrounds of the participating artists, ranging from the Middle East (Yael Bartana), Scandinavia (Jakob Kolding), Eastern Europe (Bojan Sarcevic) and Germany ( Jochen Schmith) plays an important role in the understanding of spatial relations and their politics in specific regions. How, for example, different is the point of view of the young Israeli artist Yael Bartana , whose home is in a permanent state of emergency, to the one of Jakob Kolding who was brought up under the affluent Danish welfare system ? As most of the exhibited artists do not currently live in their home country, but have chosen Berlin and Amsterdam as their temporary homes, the exhibition can simultaneously reactivate a critical interpretation of national identity .

Some of the exhibited works react on the given imperative of efficiency with strategies of scattering or squandering in which a linear, goal-orientated attitude undermines actions that seem senseless or coincidental . In these circumstances the unconsciousness is activated through actions like roving, mental mapping or applied psycho-geography. Guy Debord in his book, “ Critique of Urban Geography ”, mentioned that the characteristics of a place may be determined by various criteria such as the composition of the soil or climatic conditions and occasionally can allow conclusions on the economic structure of a society and therefore their worldview.

Precise world-views and systems are thematised in the collages, videos and installations of the exhibition in different ways. ( Yilmaz Dziewior)